Teaching

Paying It Forward

Are you a recent grad student who just got hired or a junior faculty member stressing out about your Fall syllabi? I’m here to help.

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Studenting White Quarantined

I created this infographic for my students. Feel free to steal, share, edit, whatevs. You can also access it at this link.

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What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future (Redux)

ICYMI, I posted the first iteration of “What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future” last year at the conclusion of my advanced seminar called “Technology and Human Values.” I’m now teaching that course every semester and, because both emerging technology and the scholarship about it is being produced at a mind-boggling pace,…

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Helping Students Become “One-Handed” Writers

There has been a push recently to encourage more “forward facing” philosophy, a long overdue and welcome development in our profession. However, for better or worse, what gets called “public philosophy”– the aim of this push– remains pretty vaguely defined. On the one hand, some argue that public philosophy should have real-world applications, though their…

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Postmillennial Public Service Announcements

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to incorporate new assignments and activities that encourage students to think of the work they do in my courses as having real impact on their lives outside of the classroom. I’m trying to work against their tendency to sit through a course as if they were a…

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An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades, Part 3

What follows is the conclusion to a three-part series of posts detailing a pedagogical experiment that I tried out for the first time this term, which I call “An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades” (ERG). You should read all the details of ERG in the original post here, but the basic idea was to give students…

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What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future: On Philosophy and Technology

We’re nearing the end of the semester and I’m wrapping up two of the most exciting and intellectually invigorating courses I’ve taught in a long time. One of them was an upper-division undergraduate course entitled “Technology and Human Values” (syllabus here) The other was an intro-level undergrad Ethics course called “Contemporary Moral Issues” (syllabus here),…

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Civil War Letters, Redux

A few days ago, right-wing blowhard and professional alarmist, Alex Jones (of InfoWars), posted a tweet announcing that “Democrats Plan To Launch Civil War on July 4.” If you lean to the Left and somehow missed the memo about our impending revolution, never fear, because it’s all over the Twitterverse now. On July 2, Amanda Blount…

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An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades, Part 2

This is a follow-up to my post last May, in which I explained a new pedagogical device I planned to introduce in my classes this semester. I called it “An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades” and, as of two weeks ago, the experiment has begun. The basic idea is that I am giving students an opportunity to…

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